like going by Fifth Mile Meadow and now there's a house built in it, or a restaurant you dress up for where Joev Binder's mill was. Mack determIned not to get going on that. Not agaIn. He'd turn up his hill, check his mailbox, maybe come back and fix the foolish mailbox, about to lie down on its side. He'd check in on his tiny string of heifers. Instead he held steady, north. Watson claimed he'd got out of dairy for good, just barbering full time in his little shop in the yellow frame building across from the feed store: it hadn't changed much, If at all. "Say that for the rest," Mack whispered. "Say that." And their talk hadn't changed. Animals, crops. But before Watson could pull the paper ring from around his neck, Mack spoke: 'Well, I'll have a shave." How did it happen? It felt like dreaming. "Yes, I guess I'll have a shave," he decided. And then, the cloth on his face steaming while his friend gripped the ivory handle in his big fingers, stropping the blade on dirt-dark leather, Mack said, through the fog, "1 haven't had this done in years. Years." But it felt good. Lord, it did feel good! from any assignment. Joan Kruckewitt was not easily intimidated. But-this much she concluded from the session with Bull's Eye and his gun and his bed-she did think that any further chasing after Linder's killers ought to be done in company, not alone. So it was back to California, where she set out to recruit a colleague from among the old crew of Nicaragua reporters. Her call came to me. During the war, I had re- ported on the fighting in Nicaragua's east- ern wne, but I had always been reluctant to wander into the northern mountains, where the worst of the fightIng had taken place (and in that way I made my own contribution to the general American ig- norance about rural Nicaragua). I did think I ought to see what my readers had missed. Besides, I was curious about Linder. I never doubted that he was a bit fa- natical. The gun that he was known to carry did not endear him to me. Even so, I attributed a rare kind of American idealism to him I imagined that he -SYDNEY LEA must have been something like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the Northern martyrs of the Southern civil- rights movement in the United States, back in the nineteen-sixties. Only, LInder had come from the eighties gen- eration, and he was killed in a place that was farther, much farther, from home, under circumstances that- But no one has known exactly what the circumstances were. And so Joan's idea of going into the hills around Bocay appealed to me, and I agreed to go along. I even rushed ahead and made a couple of ex- ploratory trips of my own into the north, just to see what kind of world Linder had known in his last days, and what had happened in the years since. T HE first place I visited was a moun- tain called El Chipote, near the cowboy town of QyilaH, about forty miles west of Bocay. I climbed the slope with a party of Americans, Nicara- 65 guans, Argentines, and mules, under the escort of young men wearing blue uniforms and bearing AK-47s. These men were the police department of Qyilalí, or, alternatively, the armed fol- lowing of the Talavera clan, whose turf this was. The T alaveras are a notable family-an embodiment of every rural Nicaraguan event that never did get ad- equately reported to the outside world in the years following the Sandinista revolution. And at the head of our ex- pedition were two members of the fam- ily itself, Salvador Talavera and his younger brother, who was known as Little Jackal. Salvador made a lively guide. He was tall for a Nicaraguan, and he looked comfortable with his gold jewelry, shiny black military boots, oversized pis- tol, and automatic rifle. He enjoyed pointing out the historical sites. In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, the United States Marines had occupied Nicara- gua, and the northern peasants rose up against them in a rebellion led by General Augusto César Sandino. The Marines chased Sandino all over the countryside, but he kept escaping, with his peasant army, to the slopes of El Chipote Salvador pointed out the hillside where Sandino had made camp, and the tvvo Talavera brothers posed for photographs in front of it, smiling with patriotic satisfaction. Then we hiked down from the peak through a stretch of jungle, where howling mon- keys roared from the treetops and pelted us with excrement In northern NIca- ragua, the people resist the foreigners, and the monkeys resist the people. The Marines never did track San- dino down, and after a while they gave up and went home, leaving the struggle in the hands of Gen- eral AnastasIo Somoza and the National Guard. Sandino and Somoza made peace, and Sandino set out to convert his rebel army into a model farm coöperative, halfvvay be- tween El Chipote and Bocay. His idea was to spread science and prosperity through the northern hills. But Somoza lured Sandino down to Managua and had him murdered, and, with Sandino's rebellion out of the way, the Somoza family established a dictatorship that lasted for decades. In the nineteen-sixties, a handful of Marxists from the university resurrected